Roy Longmore Dies; Australian 'Legend,' 107

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Published: July 2, 2001

Roy Longmore, who was proclaimed a legendary figure by the Australian government last year as one of the nation's last surviving veterans of the World War I battle at Gallipoli, died on June 21 at a nursing home in Melbourne. He was 107.

Mr. Longmore was a lowly enlisted man and he performed no exceedingly heroic feats. But he symbolized the sacrifices of the Anzacs, the 68,000 soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in the gruesome and failed eight-month campaign to capture the Gallipoli peninsula from the Turks as a prelude to an attack on Constantinople, and he was granted a state funeral on Friday.

In the autumn of 1915, Mr. Longmore, serving with the 2nd Division, was tunneling through hills under orders to plant land mines beneath Turkish trenches on Gallipoli.

In January 2000, Mr. Longmore and the two other remaining Australian veterans of Gallipoli were pictured as young soldiers on postage stamps issued in the Australian Legends series. The three stamps, titled The Last Anzacs, were reproduced in gold for display at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

''Gallipoli was a defining moment in the history of our fledgling nation,'' Bruce Scott, Australia's minister for veterans affairs, observed when the stamps were issued. ''It was the first time Australia had taken its place on the international stage as an independent country.''

When Australia entered World War I, it had been a commonwealth for more than a decade, but its people identified themselves mostly with their home states. The Australians began looking to their common heritage when reports arrived of their soldiers' bravery at Gallipoli, where Allied and Turkish troops suffered at least 500,000 casualties in trench warfare.

Australians mark April 25, the date of the first landings at Gallipoli, as Anzac Day, a time for memorial tributes to their 50,000 countrymen who fought there -- more than 8,000 died -- and a salute to all veterans.

Mr. Longmore had no zest for recalling his war experiences. ''I was underground most of the time,'' he said of his 10 weeks at Gallipoli. ''I didn't see much.''

When he ventured his 6-foot-1 frame above ground, it was at enormous peril. He told of warning a new arrival to keep his head down because the Turks were excellent shots. ''He wouldn't take much notice of me,'' Mr. Longmore remembered. ''He put his head up and ended up in the trench behind us, dead. Bullet straight through the head.''

Notwithstanding the carnage at Gallipoli, Mr. Longmore remembered it as ''a nice picnic ground'' compared with the Western Front. He was wounded three times in France and was momentarily given up for dead when he was shot as the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, approached.

''We were patrolling in a gully when suddenly half a dozen Germans appeared over a hill armed with machine guns and opened fire,'' Mr. Longmore recalled. ''Jerry riddled me, knocking me flat on my back, and the last I heard was 'Longy's had it, they got him.' ''

But his fellow soldiers saw him move and rescued him.

Roy Longmore was born on April 29, 1894, in Geelong, Victoria, and worked on his family farm before enlisting in July 1915. His war wounds precluded farm labor after his discharge in July 1919, so he worked as a taxi driver in Melbourne. His recreational pursuits were also altered by the war. Before, he had hunted rabbits, but he no longer had an appetite for firing at anything alive. He contented himself with aiming at clay targets.

Mr. Longmore's death leaves Alec Campbell, 102, of Hobart, Tasmania, as the last Australian survivor of Gallipoli. The third veteran pictured on the Last Anzacs stamps, Walter Parker, died one day after the stamps were issued; he was 105.

''We just did what we were told,'' Mr. Longmore once remarked in reflecting on World War I. ''They're no good, these wars. A lot of lives lost, no use at all. There's got to be another way of fixing up these rows without killing each other.''